I LOVED HIM FIRST - by Aderonke Lawal

I LOVED HIM FIRSTMy name is Titobiloba, though the world that knew me before it knew my pain simply called me Titobi. I am, by any honest account, beautiful, not just in the way people mean when they're being kind, but truly, the kind of beauty that sits quietly and doesn't need to announce itself. I am kind too, and compassionate in a way that has survived things that should have hardened me instead. Sijibomi came into my life the way certain people do, not through blood, but through timing, through grace, standing where family should have stood and didn't. He came during the hardest season of my life, when I became a mother far too young for a world that was unkind to young mothers, and everyone else found reasons to look away. Siji didn't look away. He came. He stayed. He reassured me, in the quiet, unglamorous way real protection looks... not the version people write songs about, but the version that shows up. I fell in love with him slowly, the way you fall into things you're too afraid to name. I never said it. Life was already asking too much of me, a new baby, a body still learning to be a mother's body, a heart still learning what safety even felt like. So I loved him in silence, and told myself silence was enough. Life did what life does,it moved us along different roads. Some seasons we spoke often; some we lost each other entirely. But I never lost the loving. One day, I found the courage the silence had cost me, and I told him. He was gentle about it... he was always gentle. "I love you very much, Titobi mi, but I see you more as family, and I will always protect you." It hurt in the way truth hurts when it's kind and unwanted at the same time. But I had a child to raise and a self to rebuild, so I did what I'd always done, I carried it quietly, and let myself detach, piece by piece. Then Siji loved someone else. Someone educated, someone put-together, someone who had never had to claw her way into womanhood the way I had. I watched it happen the way most heartbreak is witnessed now, not in a conversation, but in photos, in captions calling another woman the smartest woman in the world. I said nothing. It was the happiest I had ever seen him, and some loves are large enough to choose someone else's happiness over their own hunger. I deleted the numbers. I told myself I'd moved on. I hadn't, I'd just closed the door and promised myself I wouldn't open it again. I wasn't invited to his wedding. I heard about it secondhand, how beautiful it was, how happy he looked. I smiled, because he deserved that joy, genuinely. And I wept, because some small, unreasonable part of me had wanted to be the one who gave it to him, even knowing I never had the capacity to be that for him at the time. Time didn't heal me. But it taught me things, slowly, about myself, about what I needed, about survival. I tried love again, once, and it left me with another child and no bitterness toward Siji, whom I never let anywhere near the wreckage, I honestly did not remember he existed at some point in my own storm. Years passed. The baby Siji had helped me survive into being was, by Nigerian law, an adult. I found a path, I found structure, I finally have a life I am building, a career that would leave a long lasting legacy. And then, one ordinary afternoon, a text came in from a number I didn't recognize but somehow already knew, every digit familiar in the way a person's handwriting is familiar even after years apart. Siji. I dropped everything I was doing, like I always did whenever it was Siji. We talked immediately, easily, as if no time had passed at all, and yet with a new maturity neither of us had had the first time. He apologized for the silence. I told him he could never offend me, and I meant it fully. We spoke of family, of how life had shaped each of us differently. I realized, somewhere in that conversation, that I had found my voice in the years he'd been gone, my confidence, my courage, the woman I'd quietly become while he wasn't watching. And something in me, some old locked room, opened again. I have shut men out, but Siji is no ordinary man, not to me. I know what I want is not something I am owed, and not something I can ask for. I know it changes nothing about who Siji is, a good man, a faithful one, a man who has never once given me a reason to believe there is a door left ajar. He still only sees me as the little sister he'd sworn to protect, while I already imagine him between my legs as I stare up into his loving eyes, even if it's just once, ever. He would never ask for anything else, and I would never truly wish harm on him or the woman he chose. I simply wish, in the private, unreasonable corner of my heart where wishes don't ask permission, that I could have even half of the love he has for his wife. Or all of it. After all, I loved him first. I know how that sounds, said out loud. I'm not asking anyone to tell me it's fine. What I want to ask you instead is this: How do you let go of a love you never got to have in the first place, one that was never yours to keep, and never anyone's fault that it wasn't? Have you ever loved someone so completely that you had to walk away from them twice, once when they chose someone else, and once again just now, when they came back? And if you've been there, what did you do with a love like that, when there was nowhere left for it to go? ----Ayoka ọmọ Akanmu

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